Tag Archive: invid project

As it was one of the final dissemination events of the InVID project, and a rather successful one, we portray what happened at ICT 2018 in Vienna in more detail here to give the reader an impression of one of the project’s final dissemination activities.

InVID was represented at ICT 2018 with a stand / booth that was manned over the entire three days of the conference and exhibition. ICT 2018 took place from 4 – 6 December 2018 in the Austrian capital Vienna. Many people stopped by our stand, including – among others – Claire Bury from the EU Commission, Deputy Director General at DG Connect, and Ingolf Schädler, Deputy Director General at the Austrian Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology. A photo of the InVID project co-ordinator, Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, talking to a group of high-profile visitors appears on the top of this article (photo taken by Jochen Spangenberg).

Stand visitors were very interested in the issue of false / misleading information in general, and how InVID aids to counter the spread of misinformation. This way, we raised considerable interest among the political sphere, but also among others interested in our solutions (e.g. in particular individuals with a research / academic background as well as business interests.)

In addition to our continuous stand presence in Hall X3, we hosted a networking session on day 2 of the conference (Wednesday, 5 December 2018). The session was organised by CERTH’s Symeon Papadopoulos and featured contributions – in order of appearance – by Vasileios Mezaris (CERTH), Denis Teyssou (AFP), Jochen Spangenberg (Deutsche Welle), Nikos Sarris (Athens Technology Center) and Zlatina Marinova (Ontotext). The topic of the lively presentations and discussions: “Fighting Disinformation through Human, Crowd and Artificial Intelligence.” Presentations dealt with InVID project outcomes, work of the (now completed) EU project REVEAL (one of the EC’s very first projects dealing with verification of digital content – started in 2013 and completed in late 2016. More on https://revealproject.eu/), Truly Media (a collaborative verification platform developed by ATC and Deutsche Welle – more on http://www.truly.media/), and the newly started EU projects WeVerify (also tackling misinformation – started on 1 Dec 2018, more on https://weverify.eu/) and the coordination action SOMA (building and supporting a European Disinformation Observatory – more on http://www.disinfobservatory.org/).

Panel of the InVID networking session at ICT 2018 (Photo by Symeon Papadopoulos)

The InVID team itself reported very actively about its presence and activities. We produced short videos with most project members present, in which they outlined project outcomes, results and achievements, and used Twitter as our primary channel to report about our activities and what was going on.

Our own efforts were supported greatly by others reporting and tweeting about us and what we got up to. Below, we provide screenshots of the tweets that gained most attention and interactions.

Top tweets by third parties mentioning InVID. Screenshots of respective posts on Twitter

Overall, the consortium is very pleased about its presence at ICT 2018. We can confidently say that it was a big success as

it contributed further to raising awareness on various aspects of the misinformation ecosystem, including our work and efforts;

we reached numerous new people and showcased what we got up to and provide to the factchecking / verification community;

in the course of ICT 2018 our verification plug-in surpassed the number of 8,000 users;

we gained about 120 new Twitter followers within a week, most of them in the course of the conference;

feedback obtained was highly positive and came from a great variety of stakeholders and interested parties.

Summing up, the InVID presence at ICT 2018 in Vienna can be called a high profile event with considerable impact. In order not to praise ourselves too much here, we let others have the final word, and conclude with a tweet from @EU_Media_Lit, the official EU account on disinformation and media literacy policy in the EU Commission.

InVID will have a booth in the ICT 2018 Exhibition, which is part of the flagship EU meeting on Information and Communication Technologies, the ICT 2018 event, taking place in Vienna on 4-6 December 2018. Meet us in Hall X3, Stand i24to see the latest InVID tools and technologies in action, and explore collaboration possibilities.

The InVID session was attended primarily by journalists from all over Slovenia, who got to participate in a hands-on demonstration and testing of the InVID Verification Plugin. The InVID session was hosted at the EU House: the offices of the European Commission Representation and the information office of the European Parliament in Slovenia.

More details (in Slovenian) about this presentation, can be found here.

A few hundred visitors from TV channels, media organizations, software houses and research organizations passed through the InVID booth, that was nicely located between the BBC R&D booth and our colleagues from the COGNITUS project, to check the functionalities of the InVID technologies. More specifically, these visitors were introduced to:

the freely-available InVID Verification Plugin, a browser extension that offers a set of analysis components for debunking fake videos online;

the InVID Verification Application, a web-based integrated technology with advanced content management and verification functionalities (beyond the ones supported by the free plugin);

and the InVID Mobile App, a mobile application (available for both iOS and Android users) that enables newsworthy content contribution to media organizations by the public (i.e. trusted citizens/users of the app).

Our participation in IBC allowed us to get in touch with potential customers of the InVID technologies, such as mainstream television groups, providers of social media feeds for broadcasters and also international television networks. Indicative dissemination and promotion activities of our presence in IBC are the following.

Rolf Fricke (Condat) was interviewed about InVID and the InVID technologies, on a live Radio show by Myrte van der Putten.

A collaborative demonstration of the established communication between the CONGITUS platform (used for UGV content enhancement) and the InVID Verification Plugin (used for UGV content verification), was made with the help of our partners from the CONGITUS project.

InVID has a booth in the IBC 2018 Exhibition – the top annual business conference and exhibition of the media, entertainment and technology industry, held in RAI Amsterdam, Sept. 14-18, 2018.

Meet InVID in the Future Zone of IBC 2018, Hall 8, stand 8.F16. We will be there to showcase the latest InVID tools and technologies, and discuss with you how InVID can address your individual video and news verification needs.

After the introductory part of the event, which was made by Prof. Andreas Veglis, the workshop started by an overall presentation of the InVID project by Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, the project co-ordinator. Dr. Mezaris explained the project’s motivation with the help of some indicative examples of fake news. Following, he described the project’s goals and overall concept for meeting these goals, and briefly discussed the developed integrated technologies for newsworthy media collection and verification. The given presentation can be seen below.

Subsequently, Mr. Evlampios Apostolidis from CERTH-ITI, gave a talk on fake news that rely on video reuse. In particular, Mr. Apostolidis presented some examples of such fakes, discussed the most common approaches of journalists to deal with this type of fake news and explained how the InVID technologies can assist journalists to identify the original video source. For this, he presented the developed web application for video fragmentation and reverse keyframe search, that enables the users/journalists to perform reverse video search at the fragment-level, and detect previously published versions of the same video online. The given presentation can be found below.

Following, Dr. Symeon Papadopoulos from CERTH-ITI, discussed the current status on the creation and spread of fake news and rumors via social networks and listed a number of credibility signals that could allow a user (i.e. a journalist or a media verification expert) to evaluate the veracity of a news item. Finally, we presented the functionalities and characterists of the developed context analysis and aggregation toolkit that has been developed in InVID and is integrated in the InVID Verification Plugin, and highlighted the creation (and future public release) of a constantly extendable Fake Video Corpus, that can support the current and future reseach on this field.

The first part of the workshop ended with a presentation focusing on image forensics analysis, made by Dr. Markos Zampoglou from CERTH-ITI. Dr. Zampoglou explained the existing challenges related to the detection of tampering of digital images, highlighting the fact that the sharing of these images via social media platforms entails a re-compression process that usually erases most of the digital traces that could assist the identification of manipulations. Based on this observation, he stressed the need to analyse the most earliest version of a digital image, and discussed the funtionalities of the REVEAL Media Verificaiton Assistant that is integrated in the InVID Verification Plugin. The given presentation can be seen in the following.

The second part of the workshop was a hands-on session, where the participants of the workshop had the opportunity to get activelly involved in a step-by-step process containing:

a brief explanation of all different components integrated in the plugin (given by Evlampios Apostolidis);

a real-time debunking of a couple of examples of fake news based on video re-use (performed by Evlampios Apostolidis);

a real-time debunking of a couple of examples of fake news based on context change (performed by Olga Papadopoulou, also from CERTH-ITI);

a real-time debunking of a couple of examples of fake news based on image tampering (performed by Markos Zampoglou).

The aforementioned examples were used for demonstration purposes, while an additional set of examples was provided to the participants of the workshop, aiming to motivate them to discover the functionalities, capabilities and limitations of the different components of the plugin, and send us their feedback (via the integrated survey) concerning their experience with this tool.

The InVID project and the developed technologies for newsworthy media collection and verification, were presented on a meeting focusing on tools for detection and verification of videos shared on social networks, that was co-organized by CERTH/InVID and the Media Informatics Lab of the Journalism & Mass Media Dept. of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, on Thursday 14th of December 2017.

An audience (approx. 80 people), comprised by professors, academics and students of the Journalism & Mass Media Dept, journalists and media verification experts, was initially informed about the InVID project by the project co-ordinator Dr. Vasileios Mezaris, who introduced the project’s motivation, goals, overall concept and integrated technologies for newsworthy media collection and verification.

Following, Mr. Evlampios Apostolidis from CERTH-ITI, gave a talk on fake news that rely on video reuse and the way that InVID handles such fakes. In particular, he presented the developed web application for video fragmentation and reverse keyframe search, that assists journalists to perform reverse video search at the fragment-level, and detect previously published versions of the same video online.

Then, Dr. Symeon Papadopoulos from CERTH-ITI, discussed methods for automated detection of fake posts on social media and highlighted the efficiency and functionality of an InVID tool (which was based on one of the outcomes of the Reveal EU-funded project) for contextual analysis. This tool is capable to identify and evaluate verification-related content, and provide clues about the trustworthiness of a social media item to the journalists.

Subsequently, Dr. Markos Zampoglou from CERTH-ITI, presented the developed tools for image forensic analysis. Dr. Zampoglou described, with the help of some representative examples, different types of image tampering, explained the InVID apprach to identidy many of them, and outlined the challenges of this task, the limitations of existing approaches as well as some future directions.

Finally, Mr. Denis Teyssou from AFP, joined the meeting via Google Hangouts and gave a nice presentation about the verification functionalities of the developed plugin for fake news video debunking.

Members of the InVID team will take part in a focused workshop organized by the UN High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva on December 6-7.

This experts’ meeting on “Digital Image Authentication and Classification” will look into:

how human rights investigations are conducted by OHCHR & NGOs;

what image- and multimedia-related problems and technical challenges are encountered in the course of such investigations;

and how existing and under-development tools for authenticating, analyzing, and classifying digital images (including tools we are developing in InVID!) could contribute to the work of human rights investigators.

On 29-30 November, the NEM Initiative holds its annual summit in Madrid, Spain at the Museo Reina Sofía. InVID will be represented by Jochen Spangenberg of Deutsche Welle. Jochen will deliver a keynote on day one of the conference, entitled “What the F _ _ _!?”: Handling and verifying social media content.

The aim of the NEM Initiative

NEM stands for New European Media. The primary aim of the NEM Initiative is to provide a platform that fosters “the convergence among Media, Content, Creative industries, Social Media, Broadcasting and Telecom sectors, as well as Consumer electronics to develop a common innovation environment for the new European media landscape.”

Every year, the NEM Initiative hosts its annual NEM Summit. This year, it will take place in Madrid, Spain, on 29 and 30 November 2017.

A versatile programme

The NEM Summit programme consists of various strands. Wednesday morning will focus on EU policies and strategies, upcoming calls for projects and future strategic orientations of the NEM Initiative. The afternoon then sees three keynote presentations and a plenary session on new programme formats.

The second day of the summit, Thursday 30 November, has two parallel tracks throughout the day. Topical areas include:

Cultural Heritage and Digital Tourism,

The Future of Digital Media,

Toward the Future of Social Media,

Building the FMI Ecosystem through Experimentation,

Personalisation and Accessibility,

Cluster Excellence for Digital Creative Industries.

In the course of both days, attendees can also attend the exhibition that runs throughout the two days of the summit.

Meeting up

If you are interested in meeting up with Jochen to talk about InVID and what we get up to, drop him a line. You can contact him via Twitter (@jospang). Of course, you are also most welcome to attend his keynote speech in which he will also refer to some of the work we have carried out so far in InVID. Hasta la vista en Madrid!

During three days, InVID project was demoed by Gerhard Rudinger (APA-IT) and Denis Teyssou (AFP) in the startup space of the World Digital Content and IFRA Expo in Messe Berlin, the traditional yearly event of the press and publishing industry organized by WAN-IFRA, the World association of newspapers and publishers.

InVID was also presented on the main conference stage in the panel “Preparing for the 2020s”, where Denis Teyssou demonstrated the InVID Verification Plugin in front of more than 100 media professionals (see indicative images below):

on a Russian video re-used out of context to create a xenophobic climate during the French presidential election;

on the Eduardo Martins fake war photographer affair, with a new feature aiming to detect pictures which have been mirrored;

on a North Korea picture which shows evidence to have been tampered.

Mr. Denis Teyssou demonstrating the InVID Verification Plugin to the participants of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.

Indicative view of the audience of the panel “Preparing for the 2020s” of WAN-IFRA.